Sales Estimates for November, 2008

Below you'll find the sales estimates for comics and trade paperbacks sold in the direct market for November, 2008. The sales numbers below are estimates based on the information provided by Diamond Comics Distributors earlier this month. Sales estimates for October, 2008 can be found here.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when reading this data. These numbers are just estimates for the sales through Diamond to direct market retailers. It does not include any sales outside of the Diamond channel such as newstands, book stores or overseas markets. Since the majority of habitual comic book readers are served through this sales channel, these numbers are a good indicator of the core sales trends at the retail level. While not all copies will sell to readers, each retailer is buying what they think they can sell so the trends at the retail level should be a close enough reflection of the sales trends at the reader level for the purposes of discussion.

Diamond made a few changes to the reported data this month, most notably expanding the list of trades from 100 items to 300 items.

The breakdowns are for just the top 300 comics and top 300 trades listed below. These are not the overall market share. I only deal with numbers that I can see and kick around in my ever evolving number crunching system. Sometimes the numbers get a bit battered and bruised in the process.

The estimated total sales for the 300 comics was 5,765,097 comics which is down by 1,763,925 units from October and down by 1,185,793 units from November 2007. Marvel Comics had the largest percentage of the top 300 comics with 46.99% of the total units sold followed by DC Comics with 36.79%.

The top selling comic from Marvel Comics was "Ultimatum" #1 in slot 1 with an estimated 114,214 units and for DC Comics was "Batman" #681 in rank 2 with an estimated 103,137 units.

The estimated total sales for the 300 trades was 403,175 trades which is up by 99,455 units from the top 100 trades for October and up by 96,361 units from the top 100 trades for November 2007.

Topping the trades list in November was "Fables v11: War and Pieces" by DC Comics with 12,789 units.